so i look at my camera today, and i left it on the last time i used it. dumb me. i didn’t lose too much power, but got me wondering: why don’t cameras (at least comsumer grade) not have an auto off feature? i can see some people who might have their camera on for a hour or two waiting for that great shot. but there could be a feature, auto off in 2, 4 10, 30, 60 minutes, or disabled.
i mean, christ, my palm pilot has an auto off feature, and those batteries are pretty easly to come by. but camera batteries are a different matter. it’d make sense, no?
I’d guess the reason is because power consumption is very small. The camera isn’t really doing anything when it is turned on except display the status and wait for you to push the shutter. There are no power-consuming activities going on. Once you do press the shutter halfway, it starts calculating exposure and things like that. I’d imagine most cameras can last a month with the power turned on. On the other hand, digital cameras usually do have an auto-off feature, since they use power-hungry LCD displays. My old Nikon had an annoyingly short 30-second auto-off that could not be disabled.
By the way, the Palm doesn’t really turn off either. It just slows the CPU way down and turn off the display. Otherwise you couldn’t use it as an alarm.
My Kodak DC265 has a programmable auto-off that I can set the interval for. Also has separate settings for battery and AC adaptor operation. Pretty cool camera with lots of other features; the new model, DC290, is 2.3 megapixel.
Mine shuts off everything: a Vivitar 520MZ, 35mm auto-focus bought for ~$180 perhaps three years ago. After three minutes of no activity it shuts off completely, even retracting the lens- which is rather anoying when you’re stalking a shot. The auto-shut off feature cannot be disabled, or the time limit altered. - MC
My Kodak Advantix camera (sorry, don’t remember the exact model off the top of my head) also has an auto off that shuts off everything and retracts the lens after a couple of minutes. It resets all the settings to the defaults, too. Very annoying. There’s also a delay when taking a picture (press the button, it snaps the pic one second later) that makes it difficult to frame a moving subject. Both of these “features” are making me not like this camera so much.